View the discussion guide for UU communities: HTML or PDF

A lawyer, social critic, and columnist at The American Prospect, Wendy Kaminer has said that she likes to think words have power but knows they don't cast spells. She argues with her readers and expects them to argue back. Her taste for liberty, her legal training, wit, and innate contrarianism help her elude the usual political labels and inform her writings on censorship, feminism, pop psychology, religion, criminal justice, and a range of rights and liberties at issue in the culture wars.

In this new collection, Kaminer has her sights set on the fate of civil liberties in America. Opening with a powerful overview of liberty's tenuous hold on this "land of the free," Kaminer offers incisive, original investigations of political freedom in our frightened, post-September 11 world and reviews perennial threats to sexual and religious liberty, free speech, privacy, and the right to be free from unwarranted, unprincipled prosecutions.

"Wendy Kaminer is a beacon shining through the smog. She is eloquent, pugnacious, and amusing, and best of all, she is right."
-James Gleick, author of Faster

"Wonderful Wendy Kaminer! With wit and style and cold hard facts, she skewers contemporary credulity."
-Katha Pollitt, author of Reasonable Creatures

"Kaminer, a wonderfully funny social critic, takes on a host of threats to rational thought."
-Molly Ivins, author of Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush

Wendy Kaminer is the author of many books, including I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-help Fashions and Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety. Her articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, and Newsweek, and her commentaries have aired on National Public Radio.